Urban political economy of elite education: international programs in Chinese elite public high schools

ABSTRACT

This ethnographic data-driven article investigates the urban political economy of a new form of elite schooling, which is represented by the fee-charging international programs recently established by ‘key’ public high schools in metro China. Grounding the analysis in Harvey’s work on urbanization and neoliberalism, the literature on China’s development model, and Bourdieu’s theory of capital conversion, this article reveals that the construction of an international program is deeply implicated in the school’s social relationships with the state, real estate developers, and urban middle classes. While the program provides wealthy Chinese families with access to international higher education for accumulating desirable capitals at ‘world-class’ universities, the Chinese elite school generates its own capital. Through theorizing how the creation of the fee-charging international program draws together multiple forms of neoliberal profit-making and multi-scalar capital accumulation, this study adds novel conceptual and empirical insights to the emergent scholarship of elite and international education.

KEYWORDS:

• Capital conversion
• international schools in China
• ‘key’ high schools
• neoliberalism
• state entrepreneurism
• urban studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Some scholars (e.g., Li, 2019; X. Wu, 2017; Ye, 2015) translate the Chinese term ‘zhongdian’ schools literally as ‘key point’ or ‘key-point’ schools.

2 There are various international high-school curriculum programs with notable orientations to the US, UK, and Canada (see e.g., Lee et al., 2016; Liu, 2020; Wright & Mulvey, 2022; Wu & Koh, 2022).

3 See Liu and Apple (2023) for the notions of middle class, upper-middle class, and upper class in China.

4 The CPPCC is an important part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) united front system, and it serves as a political advisory body to the CCP. The CPPCC consists of experts, scholars, and other cultural elites predominantly from non-ruling, legally-permitted political parties in China. Although the CPPCC doesn’t have real legislative power, its members can put policy proposals for social and political issues to the Chinese government (Yao & Han, 2016).

5 There are three major types of international schools approved by China’s Ministry of Education. Traditional international schools exclusively serve the children of foreign diplomats and expatriates, while privately-funded international schools and international programs in Chinese public schools cater to Chinese students who plan to attend universities abroad.

6 Danwei are the state-owned enterprises ‘acting as the basic unit of the socialist collectivism regime’ (Li & Wu, 2008, p. 406).

7 For details on multiple social actors involved in the development of the Sunny High IAP program, see Liu (2018).